Is it inherintely always immoral to not want mass immigration, even if it lowers our quality of life?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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I’ve had this think for about three hours regarding illegal immigration because I saw a youtuber I liked get deported and it really made me ponder the ethos of illegal immigration and nation states.

To preface, let me say that nation states are pretty immoral: If you have Country A that’s wealthy and has a population of 50 million and Country B that’s very poor and has a population of 500 million and Country A spends a billion to improve their quality of life by 5% where that same billion could be spent to improve the quality of Country B’s life by 50%.

Is it immoral for Country A to priotrize themselves? Yes. Just as it is immoral for a billionaire to accquire even more wealth for himself to improve his quality of life by some small tiny amount, it is immoral for Country A to also improve their quality of life by some small tiny amount.

I believe that we as a society, as humanity, understand this. So much of utopia fiction imagines humanity as a singular state but how do we as a society today deal with this dilemia? We ignore it…we don’t think of the people suffering in the philpines, nigeria, chille, with quality of life a thousand times worse than ours. We accept the status quo and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.

But then comes the illegal immigrant…the character who takes it upon themselves to better their lives, even when they have been ruled a terrible hand by fate. Is it immoral to remove this figure, who’s only sin is to improve their life?

Remember, the main reason to deport this person is that we deplete resources in some sort of manner. Welfare, taxes, jobs, etc. Just as with Country A and Country B… the same dilemia returns. But unlike last time, this can not be ignored.

It is immoral, but now, imagine a more extreme example: Let us say that there are one HUNDRED MILLION illegal immigrants all of a sudden. The quality of life has decreased by 1/3rd of what it is and let us say that the quality of life for the illegal immigrant is 1/30th. The average citizen of Country A is very upset, understandably, but what of the illegal immigrants, with their situations being so dire it is tenfold that? Euphoria, you will find. For while their lives may be 1/30th the quality of their previous state, in their homeland of Country B it was a 1/1000th. It was so terrible that even in the terrible state they find themselves in Country A, they feel great joy and hope for the future of their lives.

…Would it then be immoral, for the citizens of Country A, to want to deport these peoples, in order to return to their previous standard of living…? That is the question I have come here in this subreddit to ask.

I’ve been wondering about that question for a while and I myself can’t escape the fact that Country A is selfish. They seek to improve their already great lives just in the same way that rich people are selfish to avoid taxes to maintain their already amazing lives, would Country A not be the exact same thing? And if the answer is yes it makes me kind of depressed…what if I have friends that say “screw all of that” and say “No”? That is the natural response to having your quality of life ruined for a sudden moral dillemia…am I then friends with selfish immoral people? And if so, would it be hypocritical for us to expect that same redistrubition in our internal countries such as taxing the rich and whatnot? I do not know the answer and I am scared to answer it…what do you all think? I would love some opinions…

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What ethical standard are you using to evaluate your goodness?

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Nice post here! I think you are right about most of this. And also there is more to the picture. It is, as I see it, a problem of optimization. We could let the entire third world into the first world, but that would only destroy the first world (turn it into the third world). Likewise, letting no one in from the third world is also bad and happens to be highly immoral and selfish as you correctly point out. Then again, even with this in mind, remember that many of the problems of the third world (not all, but a lot) are caused directly by the actions of the first world (exploitation, war, coups against their properly elected leaders, etc). With this in mind, the first world has a moral obligation to help or at least to stop harming, but then again this obligation does not necessarily extent to opening our doors to allow them to come here because this achieves a net loss for their own societies. “Brain drain” it is called, where it tends to be the more intelligent and motivated, and wealthier, people who immigrate from the third world into the first world and thus leaving their former societies worse off, abandoned by some of their best people. The first world does this on purpose to effectively steal the smarter and more hard working people from the rest of the world to come here and work for us instead.

With all that being said, what is the best solution? We can welcome anyone who wants to come here as long as they are a net positive (not a violent criminal) and we can financially handle it. Someone once said we can have either open borders or a generous welfare system, not both. I don’t entirely agree but he does have a point in the extremes. But investment in making the lives of immigrants better is far better use of the money compared to what a lot of government money is spent on – wars, corruptions, bribes, trafficking, etc.

At the end of the day, a moral society would seek to better the lives of everyone not just its own people. And it would attempt to optimize in this direction so there is net benefit being created. So losses can be absorbed and redirected toward more effective net beneficial solutions, even if this reduces relative goods for the people already living here. Greed and selfishness are the core values of the first world today, this is immoral and very irrational/inefficient. But it is also natural and easy to understand, and some part of us already enjoys the benefits of being part of such a greedy and selfish society that (supposedly) prioritizes us who happened to be born here far more than it prioritizes the rest of the people on the planet. Again this is irrational but easy to understand, and it does form the basis of a more or less functioning system over time.

So the real problem is not only to identify the errors and find some useful solutions toward optimization but also to think about how can we actually transition humanity in terms of incentives and natural structures in a better, more ethically and consciously elevated direction? That seems to be more along the lines of the work of culture, religion, art. Interpersonal relations and the products of human efforts to map the values-spaces around and within us. This is not strictly an economic problem, hence one reason why economics is such a primary focus in the first world now. Everything is kept held down to a largely materialistic level, this keeps the system ‘stable’ enough to maintain itself across various irrationalities and errors. But over time, those stack up and must be addressed.

I would love to figure out how to push humanity into a more elevated ethical and conscious state of being, but that is very slow and difficult work. I don’t think there are any easy solutions or short cuts here, and I also think we tend to learn by making mistakes. A lot more pain is probably necessary to cause a sufficient number of people and a sufficient scope of the human existentia and values-space of meaning, including culturally and interpersonally-emotionally, to wake up and climb another rung or two higher upon the universal ‘ladder of being’. The consciousness and society of any ‘sentient species’ like humans could easily be compared according to metrics like this, but unfortunately we are the only such species we know of, so we have no one to compare ourselves to.

Perhaps when AI becomes dominant or when aliens get here and we have another sufficiently similarly sentient species to compare ourselves with, then some really positive changes could occur. I really don’t know. Much of my own work has been focused on the errors and how to optimize better. It is one thing to identify problems but a whole other scope and difficulty trying to figure out how those problems might be solved.

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If you have a nice house is it ‘immoral’ to not want to open it to all the homeless losers and drug addicts who want to live in it?

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No. That is not what is being said in this topic. You are attempting to reduce a very big and complex issue to one simple and extreme example. That is a fallacy of false generalization and false reductio ad absurdem.

The question is if there is a moral imperative to immigration levels that might lead to less qualirty of life for those already here, as opposed to taking the more selfish view and not allowing any immigration if it could lead to less quality of life for ourselves. Whether or not you want to let homeless drug addicts into your house is also a moral consideration for you to make, since it might help them out while negatively impacting your own quality of life, but that would be a different situation entirely. The analogy would only work if we are talking about letting in a number of foreign drug addicts on par with the number of people already living here. If there are already 4 people living in your house (just making up a number that seems reasonable) and you are asking about letting in a single homeless drug addict into your home, then your analogy might be valid if we were talking about letting in roughly 100 million foreign homeless drug addicts into the US. But that is not what we are talking about, at least that is not what I am talking about.

If this topic was asking if we should let 100 million foreign homeless drug addicts into the US, my answer would be no. The moral implications here are strong enough tilted toward the side of harm that it becomes untenable to hold that position, even if it might help those 100 million people. When an action leads to direct harm on oneself then the morality of self-defense begins to compete.

Is there a moral obligation to do an action that would cause huge positive improvement for lots of other people while only having a very small inconvenience upon yourself? Yes, it could be very reasonably argued that this would be a moral obligation, at least in certain contexts. But it is altogether a different question to ask if a moral obligation exists to do an action that would cause huge positive improvement for lots of other people while having a severely negative and very bad effect upon yourself. It is not reasonable to expect or claim a moral obligation that leads to such levels of personal harm. If you let homeless drug addicts into your house you are literally risking your own life and safety, and that of your family if you live with family members. So the moral obligation shifts to or at least strongly competes with a prioritization of safety and preservation of life.

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It’s called an analogy. I don’t read mile long essays by illiterate know-nothings with zero reading comprehension skills.

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Genius…..no cuntishness here.

No sireee. Brilliance….Jew smarts.

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Good job ignoring where I proved your analogy was a false one :+1:

Clearly a willful ignorance is your only defense at this point. Well played sir.

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Good job proving you are an even bigger moron than you appeared previously. That’s quite an achievement :laughing:

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Thank you for your replies ProfesserX, they were enjoyable to read and very insightful. I posted this question across a few different places like reddit, 4chan, etc and your replies are my favorite and most indpeth so far.

Originally when I made this post, I actually had some anxiety regarding this question because I have a mental disorder where I obsess over moral problems exessively, its “moral OCD” or whatever. Regardless, its seemed to have dissispated significantly from just sleeping it off but I do enjoy your replies nonthless from an intellectual prespective.

This was the first time I used a non mainstream internet forum in almost a decade, since I figured I needed a more specialized place to have a good discussion around this topic. The first website that came up was one called “the philosophy forum” which was invite only, really annoyed me personally. I figured they were snobby and clique-like because, like, who does invite only forums right? But I think I understand their rationale behind an invite only forum better now, there’s allot of these low quality right-wing characters here who don’t really bring any depth or good discussion and kind of pollute the overall user quality. I’m guessing that these people simply got banned on more mainstream forums and are going to the second page of google to get their social media fill. It makes me a bit sad to see someone as passionate as you sharing a forum with these leftovers of the internet but alas.

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I hope you never become a refugee for whatever reason and face being called a “homeless loser or drug addict”! It is the lack of empathy that is dragging this world back into the darkest of times. Of course, we want to retain our “nice house,” but we also need to help people overcome the conditions that have made them look for another place to live. They also want a “nice house” and it probably isn’t yours, but Europe and America have intervened in so many lives out of an elitist ideology that it has made countries into “third world” countries.

The thing is, if things go on the way they have, we might find that nobody has a “nice house” anymore because we have destroyed our living conditions or engaged in a war that few will survive.

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He must be really intelligent because he agrees with you :rofl:

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@Bob

‘Interesting’, yet I’m not the one who joined the military in order to terrorise people who had never done me any harm. Who the fuck are you to lecture me or anyone else on ‘empathy’??

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I don’t have a problem with your opinion on the matter, indeed the thinking of “I do not want to lower my quality of life significantly so that ten people increase their quality of life significantly” is not an unpopular opinion and not one I disagree with. I think between two buttons, we would all likely choose to maintain the status quo. That’s of course not to say we wouldn’t WANT to improve the outside world, I don’t think its unpopular at all to say that we do far too little to help the developing world, really we do more to hurt it and that is immoral. It is simply that while one option is morally better, the extreme costs are likely too much for any of us to really stomach doing.

My problem with users like you is you don’t write allot of words, you don’t put allot of thought into your posts. Your posts are very short and like ProfesserX correctly pointed out, don’t have allot of thought put into them. You could’ve made the letting “homeless people in your house” argument allot less strawmanny and it would’ve been more reasonable but then you’d have to write more than just a few sentences with maybe an emoji at the end, no?

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Once more, you are obviously privileged to have never found yourself in a situation that you couldn’t immediately change, and have never had to do things that you didn’t want. This is also the situation of refugees and it is quite normal for people wanting to improve their lives and those of their children.

Your reference to my experience shows me that you have no other argument, that you are morally depraved and consumed by elitist thinking despite being a worm that lives off of other people.

We all live because other people have provided the conditions in which we were born. Few of us have built up a life from nothing, and yet people in the West consider themselves more worthy than others.

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Mass immigration is actually really bad environmentally AND not good for the countries that people are leaving en masse from. When you have too many people crammed into one place it puts major stress on resources and infrastructure. What about when Indian surgeons and doctors leave India to go to a ‘better’ country? That leaves Indians with that many fewer surgeons and doctors for THEM.
It’s also racist to assume that your own country is so much better than their countries. Frankly I would rather live in Mexico than the US. Mexico is beautiful.
How about you stop crowing about how your country is THE GREATEST and then maybe people wouldn’t come there. Just a suggestion.

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Get lost terrorist and murderer. When it comes to moral high ground you are below ground level.

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How about pretending you know anything about me and where I live, what I’ve done and how I have interacted with the world. You are showing your arrogance with every word.

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@Bob Maybe you shouldn’t assume that my general comment was about you personally, since your name wasn’t on it and it wasn’t a reply to you.

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‘A lot’ is written thus so. You’re welcome.